How Female Business Travelers Save Their Employers Millions

Companies, take note: Women who travel for business plan further in advance than their male counterparts, and as a result, save their employers millions of dollars, according to a study by corporate-travel firm Carson Wagonlit Travel. It's not exactly magic, either. After looking at a database with 6.4 million flight bookings from 2014, researchers found that women book trips earlier than men do—typically purchasing their plane tickets about two days sooner.

That might not sound like much, but 48 hours can result in major savings for companies. On average, the data shows that men spend over $113 more per ticket when no controls are used. (As the researchers state, "That number doesn’t take into account the differences between men and women in the routes they commonly take, differences in class usage, or disparities in when travel happened.") So what happens when those factors are put into play? Women still save their companies about $17 per trip, which comes out to a two percent difference in ticket costs. It might not be a huge deal for small businesses, but for larger ones, those dollars can really add up. The researchers did the math, and a company with 21,000 traveling employees, for instance, could save $1 million if men booked as early as women do.

Age plays a role as well. Women 70 to 74 book the furthest in advance, with the number of days before travel decreasing steadily as age declines. (It's no surprise then that millennial women save their companies the least.) Male business travelers book closer to travel time than women in every age group, but like their female colleagues, that number also correlates with age.

Both men and women who travel frequently for work are less likely to plan much in advance. In fact, booking time is almost identical for those who take 28 or more work trips per year. It's in the one to four trips per year range than women start to really outpace men by booking their flights further in advance. This makes sense, when you consider that frequent fliers have a shorter span between trips, and might be jumping to meetings on shorter notice.

But frequency of travel isn't the only factor here, even if it's the most obvious. The researchers speculate that women might better prepare for trips, "anticipating the higher stress they report having while traveling." It's just a hypothesis, of course, and men have certainly reported stress around business travel as well. As a 2015 study titled "The Darker Side of Hypermobility" noted, "In addition to work, home and family arrangements, pre-trip travel stress includes the potential disorientation of readying oneself to enter a different state of socio-spatial relations at the destination." In other words, the lead-up can be as anxiety producing as the trip itself, and it's at least possible that by booking earlier, women are taking an actionable step to ease their nerves. Maybe men should follow their lead.